ii2 THE ASCENT OF BALLADS buried beneath the degenerate songs of the eighteenth century. The critical aberration swung to the other extreme. In the Scottish ballads Herder caught the authentic accents of a people, and he demanded the same of his own German people. The Stimmen der Volker, the ballads, could do no wrong; they had the supreme virtue of being natural Confounding poetry of different kinds or failing to discriminate between those that were similar, he included o Gongora's polished songs among his ballads, and declared that 'the greatest singer of the Greeks, Homer, is also the greatest of folk poets*. Herder praises the naivety and childlike accent of the ballads^ their firmness, truth, liveliness, and assurance, their shud- dering tragedies and passionate music, together with their innate nobleness: 4the older they are, the more popular and lively, and in the same measure the more bold and striking.' High and noble their speech; great and mighty the folk who sang them. And then he launches his impassioned appeal to the German folk—that vast kingdom, the kingdom often peoples: 'has the voice of your fathers faded away, is it silent in the dust?' Herder's passion sounded a loftier note than his matter demanded; he exaggerated the achieve- ments of ballad poets. The inclusion qf heteroclite poems in his collection led to such misprisions as F. W. Newman's: 'the style of Homer is direct, popular, forcible, quaint, flowing, garrulous: in all these respects it is similar to the old English ballad.* The sentence stirred the formidable anger of Matthew Arnold.1 He declared that Homer is 'above all, noble'—a quality incompatible with Now Christ thee save, thou proud porter, now Christ thee save and see, and While the tinker did dine, he had plenty of wine. For this reason (he wrote) the ballad style and the ballad measure are eminently ^appropriate to render Homer. Homer's manner and movement are always both noble and powerful: the ballad manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and humdrum, so not powerful. Andrew Lang and W. P. Ker are critics who have not shared this Indignation against the ballad, but the general course of eulogy has been turned aside. A writer of our own day has said: I believe that the aesthetic value of popular poetry, if we are to 1 On translating Homer.